52 Ancestors – Week 1

I’m participating in Amy Johnson Crow’s 52 Ancestors in 52 weeks this year. The writing prompt for Week 1 is “In the Beginning”.  This seems appropriate for the first week of 2025 and my first blog post. I remember when I was a kid, my mother worked as a city clerk in a small town in Florida. One day she talked to a person on the phone, a random stranger, and discovered that they were distant cousins on her father’s side from Pennsylvania. He told her about a Murtland and Young genealogy book and shared a copy with her. The book was “Family record of John Murtland and Margaret Fleming Murtland of Concord Township, Butler County, Pennsylvania” by Cleo Murtland. It even contained a photograph of my third great grandparents, Simon and Ann Eliza (Murtland) Young taken about 1899 in Butler, Pennsylvania. In the time before internet, google searches, and online library catalogs, this was such an amazing find! To see family members I knew listed in print and reading about people I never knew existed was just an amazing experience as a kid. This is one of my favorite photographs.